Ethics Social and Political Philosophy colloquium with Gustaf Arrhenius

Speaker
Gustaf Arrhenius, director of the Institute for Futures Studies and professor of practical philosophy (Stockholm).

Title
Democratic Representation of Future Generations and Population Ethics'.

Abstract
I shall consider how future people can be represented on the level of ideal theory and what implications such a representation would have for the outcomes of current decisions. More specifically, if future people are represented by proxies, what implications will that have for so-called different number cases, that is, cases where the number of people varies in the compared future populations? I will show a surprising connection between democratic theory and population ethics, and that we can derive principles used in population ethics, such as Total Utilitarianism, from some interpretations of the All Affected Principle, the most plausible solution to the democratic boundary problem.